Why China's infamous 'one-child policy' is finally being left behind

"China will loosen its decades-long one-child population policy,
allowing couples to have two children if one of them is an only
child, according to a key decision issued on Friday by the
Communist Party of China,"
reports the Chinese state Xinhua News Agency.

Richard
Bush, the director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies
at the Brookings Institution, tells Tech Insider that the change
is not unexpected but is significant.

"The main motivation is the aging population and the decline of
the working age population," Bush says. "The absolute number of
young workers has already started to decline, so that creates the
prospect of a really seriously high dependency of older people on
younger people for things like pensions and care. In the old
days, Chinese families shared the responsibilities of taking care
of the older people, but if you have just one child, that's quite
a burden."

Therein lies the cultural significance of the reversal. The
one-child policy went against one of the main tenets of
traditional China: that big families are good, that it's vital to
grow up with aunts and uncles and cousins.

"If you take the one child per family through two generations,
the younger generation has no aunts, uncles, or cousins," Bush
explains.

China has relaxed the one-child policy in recent
years— if the parents had no siblings, for
example, then they could have two kids. It also became the case
that you would
be fined for having a second child, and as China developed
economically, more and more people just paid the fine.

Before the reforms came in, during the Mao era, Chinese families
were encouraged to have several children, in an attempt to boost
China's industrialization and fill the ranks of the country's
military. As recently as the mid-1960s, the number of live births
per woman hit nearly 6, an incredibly high fertility rate.

Here's a look at China's rapidly rising median age of population,
which is driving the change.